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Most successful middle school dropouts aren’t like Jennifer Lawrence

Many middle school dropouts are older Americans or immigrants

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March 1, 2018 at 9:54 a.m. EST

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam.

Jennifer Lawrence is one of about 12 million U.S. residents 25 or older who never made it past middle school or earned a GED.

In an interview, the actress told CBS reporter Bill Whitaker that she felt “stupid,” “dumb” and “clueless” at school. She left at 14 and moved to New York City to begin acting.

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Lawrence, Forbes’s top-earning actress of 2015 and 2016, humbly admitted to defeating demographic destiny and becoming one of the most successful middle school dropouts ever.

The number of middle school dropouts in the United States continues to shrink.

Other characteristics of middle school dropouts based on Census Bureau data:

• Many of them are immigrants. Most are Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian or of multiple races.

• Some work on farms, in factories and in service-related jobs, which don’t lead to top incomes.

• In certain industries, dropouts can earn almost as much as any other worker. They tend to be jobs with low learning requirements or with strong vocational training systems, like barbers or truckers.

• Dropouts whose earnings are in the top 25 percent nationally work in industries ranging from science and technology to coal mining to oil and gas extraction. Although there are high-earning middle school dropouts in these lines of work, they represent a fragment of the overall industries.

• High-earning middle school dropouts tend to live in states with strong mining, farming and resource extraction.

• About three out of every five people with less than a middle school education immigrated to the United States. Two out of those three came from Mexico or Central America. Many of the others are of retirement age.

• Most Americans who got out before high school were either born before World War II ended or in another country. Now, every U.S. state (and D.C.) has made school attendance mandatory through age 16 or higher, barring parental permission or extenuating circumstances.

• The majority of non-Hispanic white middle-school dropouts are age 65 or older. For comparison, only a fifth of the equivalent Hispanic population is that old.